Fifteen Minutes with Bob Pyle

In October 2011, North Cascades Institute executive director Saul Weisberg and communications coordinator Christian Martin interviewed Robert Michael Pyle at his home in Gray's River in southwestern Washington State. They were working on a video celebrating the Institute's 25th anniversary, and Bob was a long-time Institute instructor with lots of stories to tell. Here is a 15-minute highlight reel in which Bob talks about his long history of teaching natural history field courses and writing workshops, what makes the Institute's approach to environmental education unique, why the North Cascades are a special mountain range and how Vladimir Nabokov's notion of "The High Ridge" has inspired Bob and the Institute's work.

View the Institute's finished 25th anniversary video here.

Pyle has been interpreting the natural world for readers for more than 30 years. Combining his Yale-educated scientific background, an insatiable curiosity for the world and a warm, generous personality that inspires his prose, Pyle explores the myriad ways in which nature intersects with our daily lives. His published work—which includes books on the natural history of the Willapa Hills, Bigfoot, butterflies, Vladimir Nabokov and his childhood in Colorado—has been recognized with two Washington State Book Awards, a National Outdoor Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. His latest book "The Tangled Bank" collects dozens of his columns from when he was a regular contributor to Orion and Orion Afield magazines.